Tiny Extravaganzas, Diane Mehta’s fiercely lyrical new collection, works the American sentence to its limits. Mehta’s poems are miniaturist examinations of art, aging, literature, grief, parenting, the sublime, labor, and faith. She chases rhythm, rhymes with wit, and upends formal verse with phrasing that moves like jazz against and within tradition. Art is both anchor and a framework for understanding the world, and each poem is an opportunity to have a conversation with the reader and with art and other artists. Her poems vary from small, contemplative musical interludes to epic poems about collective suffering. Mehta’s refined and propulsive poems come with an emotional bang that quietly breaks your heart. 

“Dynamic diction is the pulsing heart of Mehta’s excellent second book. Eschewing traditional narrative structures, she opts to create soundscapes that reflect and reinterpret events through a fragmented syntax: “Flingabout night swung in with dead leaves and young bats/ screeching. Acrobatic papers, phonemes scatting.” Mehta’s approach to rhythm and rhyme upends traditional verse forms with phrasing that moves like jazz, both against and within established poetic traditions.” Starred review in Publishers Weekly